Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Albert Gidari is the Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was a partner for over 20 years at Perkins Coie LLP, achieving a top-ranking in privacy law by Chambers. He negotiated the first-ever "privacy by design" consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Google, which required the establishment of a comprehensive privacy program including third party compliance audits. Mr.

Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As the new surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights.

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

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Last month, the Supreme Court of California may have decided the future of the public's access to "smart city" data without knowing it. In ACLU v Los Angeles Police Department, the court accepted that raw data collected by Los Angeles police and sheriff departments, using automated licence plate readers (ALPRs), constituted a public record subject to disclosure under California's Public Records Act (CPRA) absent an exemption. The court held that the catch-all disclosure exemption in the CPRA applied, which requires balancing the public interest in preventing disclosure where certain harms can be identified against the public interest served by disclosure such as furthering the public's understanding of the privacy risks of the ALPR program.

It’s difficult to recall an internal memo gone viral that has sparked as much commentary as James Damore’s statement on gender and engineering at Google. This post is not about that memo, although the volume of commentary on it did prompt the thoughts that follow. Nor is this post about workplace diversity, at least not directly. Instead, like many other “Tool Without a Handle” posts, it is about metaphor.

In particular, I wanted to test whether, in preferring the metaphor of “a tool you use” as distinct from “a place you go,” I’d unduly limited my thinking to an “androcentric” view of networked information technologies. In other words, is “tool” a masculine metaphor, implying a gendered orientation towards my preferred approach to thinking about technology?

I conclude the answer is “no,” in part because metaphor differs from gender, and in part because metaphor is a feature of language, while gender is a feature of persons. Moreover, I identify a general objection to dichotomizing and to gender metaphors.

In today's highly digitized world, copyright infringement actions, among others, are often brought against alleged infringers using information culled from Internet service provider addresses. While fair use defenses may exist against such suits, particularly when one is doing a music mash up, a preliminary question is whether the initial source evidence is accurate.

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This article examines the challenge facing cyber intelligence analysts who have to explain threat information and analysis to non-technical consumers, like executives or law enforcement. It explains why these challenges are common, but are often more pronounced in state and local government contexts. Finally, it proposes a conceptual framework to think about the tradeoffs such analysts face, examines similar challenges in other policy areas, and offers strategies for communicating threat information effectively under various constraints.

To hear some in industry and government tell it, the answer to our modern privacy dilemma is simple: give users more control. There is seemingly no privacy-relevant arena, from social media to big data to biometrics that cannot be remedied with a heaping dose of personal control. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “What people want isn’t complete privacy. It isn’t that they want secrecy.

Shall we ease into our Labor Day weekend with an absolutely repulsive video of a police detective abusing his authority against a completely innocent person for no real justifiable reason? Oh, why not?

Behold, Salt Lake City Police Det. Jeff Payne arresting Nurse Alex Wubbels in July for refusing to violate an unconscious—comatose, actually—man's rights by drawing his blood for the police without any sort of warrant whatsoever:

The bombing of a mosque and community center in suburban Minneapolis 10 days ago and the horrific events in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend are just the most recent examples of hateful violence that has become all too common in America.

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"The coalition has gathered 570,000 signatures urging Facebook to acknowledge discriminatory censorship exists on its platform, that it harbors white supremacist pages even though it says it forbids hate speech in all forms, and that black and Muslim communities are especially in danger because the hate ­directed against them translates into violence in the streets, said Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, Calif., who was part of a group that first met with Facebook about their concerns in 2014."

"Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University and an expert on internet privacy, correctly captured my angst when he told me that privacy “is not so much secrecy, but the ability to control how we present ourselves in the world.”

The whole thing is creepy, but it also serves as a stark reminder that our personal information is floating around the ether for companies to use. “There are a million different ways in which different aspects of your activities are observed and put into databases,” Narayanan said."

"“Trolling is a terrible problem,” acknowledged Ryan Calo, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington who specializes in technology issues. “Are companies doing enough? I don’t think they are.”

He quickly added, however, that “we shouldn’t live in a world where if you don’t show utmost civility, you get erased from the Internet.”"

Join Mozilla and Stanford CIS for the fourth and final installment in our series of conversations about government hacking. Information from our first three events, discussing the cybersecurity risk of government hacking, the vulnerabilities disclosure process, and recent changes to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, can be found here, here, and here.

The EastWest Institute’s Global Cooperation in Cyberspace program anticipates future security risks, defines the outlines of potential conflict and brings together the people who can do something about it.

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It’s nearly impossible to know if you're having a truly private, unmonitored conversation today. Big data and online communications open the door for widespread surveillance. But even if you feel like you personally have nothing to hide, surveillance is about much more than individual privacy – it’s about the necessary conditions of a free and just society, and protecting a space to criticize the status quo and the powers that be.

After another year of protests and unrest across the country, criminal justice reform remains a contentious issue. Some cities have experienced an increase in homicide rates, police departments are under intense scrutiny for their handling of police shootings, and prisoners are protesting living conditions. Meanwhile, policymakers are making scant progress to roll back mass incarceration.

"FBI Director James Comey has said that voter-registration sites in at least a dozen states — including Arizona — were targeted by hackers.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has broached the idea of increasing the protection for the nation’s voting systems. They could potentially be put under the umbrella of critical infrastructure, which currently includes the electrical grid and the banking system, among other things.